These big bloomers started popping open just before I left town for a big 4th of July camping trip:

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It’s a “Bela Lugosi” daylily. The throats range from screaming lime to yellow, and they’re big — about four inches across and two feet tall. I haven’t got a thing for vampires or vintage horror films, this was just the color that my plant-picker had selected. I couldn’t get the specific daylily she’d spec’d, and so I went hunting for a similar color. These are in full sun, and supposedly, with the darker daylilies, that tends to make the color less intense, but I’m not finding that to be true at all. They’re magnificent. I planted three gallon pots, probably 3 to 5 tubers in each, and now I’ve got a cluster of daylilies the size of a Smartcar. Each stem has maybe thirteen bloom pods.

But: it’s true that each blossom only lasts for a day — then it’s pretty much done. Still, they’re so … assertive. They’re like the Ethel Mermans of my garden. They’re the stars right now and they know it. Plus they’re right next to the street, so no one can escape noticing them. They’re big and brassy and they’re gonna bloom whether you like ’em or not. So THERE!

And I so love that about my garden(s). Each plant has its own time to bloom and the times are strung out across the season. The catmint is done (but I’m told that if I cut it back it’ll offer me seconds). The sunset hyssop is just now beginning. Winecups and evening primrose in full flower (and they’ll stay that way ’til frost). Finally got some more herbs and the LAST tomato in before July 4 (it’s in a brick planter, so perhaps I can hope for a tomato or two. If not, well, what the heck). The lettuce is done, done, done, finito, and ditto the chard. I’m waiting for a spare hour to make one huge chard fritatta and call it a day.

I’ve been looking at various methods of recording this rush, memorizing the sequence of the mini-seasons so that I can navigate them better next year. What I have now as far as recordkeeping is this blog and its imprecise, impressionistic chronicle of my first year of gardening as if my life depended on it, and one blank book that I’ve been filling with more technical data (like rainfall, nighttime temps, yields, bloom dates) as I go. I scrawl in it when my eyes can no longer look at a computer screen.

There are more organized versions and ways of keeping a garden journal, versions whose purpose is planning next year’s planting — or even five years out. I like the looks of this one and will try to remember to order one next year from Seeds of Change. They’ve also got an online version where you can record the same data. I just think that’s brilliant. Because how else am I going to remember to start pepper seeds three weeks earlier than the tomatoes in 2009? Who knows whether I’ll even be at the same house, planting in the same dirt? Or whether I’ll be here at all? It’s not a given. Today is all we’re sure of.

And that is the essence of gardening’s duality, the secret of its stinger, the purpose of its pull. Oh, it sucks you in with bloom and scent and fruit and buzz and a thousand be-here-now lures, but also the promise of tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, a million mysteries. Can I grow leeks? Could I seed them under lights this late and have them to char on the grill during the first snow? What about those heirloom carrots? It SAYS they’re good for clay … What is THAT funky flower? I’ve never heard of it before! Yes, it’s mid-bloom, but this grayhaired gentleman who is buying one says it self-seeds like crazy… Oh, soil, you’re a great seducer, a terrible cad, a gift-returner. For all my long Saturdays of mattock-swinging and fierce sunburn and gritty fingernails and sheer exhaustion you might — or you might not — give back lettuce-leaf basil, give cleome, give watermelon, parsley, eggplant, purple carrots.

Susan Clotfelter has always played in the dirt, but got dragged into gardening as an obsession when she reclaimed her hell corner: a weed-infested patch of clay inhabited by one tough, lonely lilac and a thicket of weeds. Along with training as a Colorado State University Extension Master Gardener volunteer, she dug deeper with beds of herbs and lettuce at her home and rows of vegetables wherever she could borrow land. She writes for The Denver Post and other publications and appears on community radio.

Julie's passion for gardening began in spring of 2000 when she bought a fixer-upper in Denver's Park Hill neighborhood, and realized that the landsape was in desperate need of some TLC. During the drought of 2003, she decided to give up on bluegrass and xeriscape her front yard. She wrote about the journey in the Rocky Mountain News, in a series called Mud, Sweat & Tears: A Xeriscape story. Julie is an avid veggie gardener as well as a seasoned water gardener.